School Fund-Raisers: Rich Areas Prosper, Poor Suffer

It is a spring ritual at many Los Angeles schools, as families flock to neighborhood campuses turned into carnivals, featuring endless ways to spend money.

With bake sales and game booths, raffles and auctions, boutiques and shows, it is the biggest moneymaker of the year on many campuses.

The success of these carnivals and other parent-organized fund-raising schemes used to mean a well-stocked art supply cabinet or a few extra field trips a year.

Now, as public schools are strangled by an ever-tightening budget noose, the money parents raise could spell the difference between a school that can provide the essentials for its students and one that cannot.

“As bad as it is, and it is bad, it is going to get worse,” said school board President Jackie Goldberg. “I don’t want to see people trying to make up the losses of hundreds of millions of dollars with fund-raisers . . . but I do think this is going to be the wave of the future.”

Parents have responded to the financial crisis in the public schools by stepping up fund raising to pay for services the district can no longer afford. With booster club donations, they have hired music teachers, set up computer centers and paid for foreign language instruction.

While some parent groups raise $20,000 or more during a single event, others pull in only a few hundred dollars over the course of a year, leaving their schools unable to fill the gaps left by district cutbacks.

The notion that parents in middle-class areas can underwrite their local schools and cushion their children against cutbacks, while families in poorer neighborhoods cannot, troubles some district officials.

“What parents want in the affluent areas is the same thing parents want in the poor areas--they want to make sure their children get a good education,” Goldberg said.

“Rather than spend their time raising money for their school, I would urge them to spend the same amount of time talking to people at their jobs, their places of worship, the parties they go to . . . putting pressure on people to make sure that public education stops getting shortchanged in Sacramento.”

Like other school systems in California, the Los Angeles Unified School District has seen its spending power erode in the 13 years since Proposition 13 put a lid on state revenue.

Cutbacks are accelerating as the state’s budget crunch worsens, forcing the district to slash its current budget by $400 million and make another $240 million in cuts for the coming year.

“I can remember 10 years ago when we had a nurse every day, and (until) four years ago we had a music teacher right here at the school and every child had music twice a week,” said Gloria Murphy Pena, a fourth-grade teacher at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood.

Now, a traveling nurse and “itinerant” music teacher visit the school once a week. The library is staffed by parent volunteers two hours a day, two days a week. There are no art and physical education teachers.

Next year--as the school board balances its $4-billion budget by slicing deeper into what once were considered basic services--schools will have to make do with less, unless private donations can fill the gaps.

“Up until this year, the money we’ve raised has been for enrichment activities,” said Bruce Schroffel, whose son and daughter attend Fairburn Elementary School on Los Angeles’ Westside. “But, with the budget cuts, it looks as if all the school district is going to pay for is a kind of no-frills program. We’re looking at having to provide the basics.”

On some campuses, tapping into parents’ largess is as easy as posting a “wish list” outside a classroom door or sending home a letter asking for help.

Pacific Palisades Elementary School’s parent booster club raised $29,000 last fall on the strength of parent donations alone, with many families contributing more than the $250 suggested by the solicitation letter.

The group netted $20,000 more with its “Food for Thought” festival this month, which drew 600 people to the Parent-Teacher Assn. president’s bluff-top home to sample dishes from a bevy of Westside restaurants and to vie for such prizes as a trip to Bali.

At other schools, where neighborhood families have less money and little time to mount elaborate fund-raisers, the task is harder.

“We’re lucky if we break even on our carnival,” said Annette Kessler, assistant principal at 66th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. “The games cost us money, the prizes cost us money. We don’t have the raffles and the auctions because we don’t get the stuff donated to us to give away--the weekend in Puerto Vallarta, the new car. And we can’t charge our families what they charge on the Westside.”

At many of those schools, fund raising is uncomfortable for teachers and parents, who know that the candy bars, carnival tickets and pancake breakfasts can stretch tight family budgets to the breaking point.

“This is not a wealthy neighborhood or anything,” said Margo Stewart, a teacher at Sierra Vista Elementary School on Los Angeles’ Eastside. “Most of our kids are on free lunch or breakfast programs” for low-income children.

“Our parents give us a lot of support, but to keep tapping into them is crazy. To have to keep going back and saying, ‘Now we need this . . .’ It doesn’t feel real good.”

Sierra Vista has no PTA or booster club, although a fledgling parent group mounted several fund-raisers this year to pay for field trips the school had to cancel when the district cut its funding last spring.

There was a Christmas boutique, featuring ornaments crafted by a handful of neighborhood mothers. Then a candy sale, then a T-shirt sale. All told, the efforts raised only a few thousand dollars.

“What you find is schools in poorer neighborhoods do as many fund-raisers, or more, than schools in more affluent areas, but they make less money on each one,” said Goldberg, who represents downtown, Hollywood and the Wilshire area.

The sales usually generate only enough to pay for frills--autograph books for graduating sixth-graders or a few field trips to the zoo. They fall far short of providing the academic enrichment programs that wealthier neighborhoods are able to support.

“A teacher position is going to cost $60,000 with benefits,” said Bud Bertrand, principal at Rowan Avenue Elementary School, a 1,600-student multitrack, year-round school on Los Angeles’ Eastside. Replacing teachers and classes cut by the district is out of reach for schools in poor communities such as his, Bertrand said.

“I don’t think it’s feasible for an East L.A. school to even consider that. We might make $1,000 on our (carnival) . . . but you can’t run a school on nickels and dimes.”

Across town, Fairburn Elementary School, with 340 students, was able to raise $14,000 through its spring carnival, with its auction of donated items, including a trip to Catalina, and a set of boxing gloves signed by heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield and former champ George Foreman.

This year, despite the district’s cutbacks, Fairburn was able to afford a part-time physical education coach and a librarian--both hired with money provided by the school’s booster club.

In Pacific Palisades, the 10-year-old booster club for Palisades Elementary has an annual operating budget of $55,000 and funds an elaborate academic enrichment program that is the envy of many private schools.

The 500-student school boasts a science center, computer lab and teachers to conduct classes in art, music and Spanish--all once provided by the school system but now considered luxuries.

“This has been our biggest (moneymaking) year,” said Jan Wolterstorff, who heads the Palisades parents group. “I think our parents understand the reality of the situation, the things their children will be missing out on (if they don’t contribute).

“For many of them, the alternative is private school,” she said. “What’s (a) $1,000 (donation) when it would cost you $16,000 or $17,000 if you had two children in private school . . . and we can offer a better program than many of the private schools.”

Although a 1978 Supreme Court decision held that inequitable funding of school districts is unconstitutional, equality of education remains an elusive concept within a sprawling district such as Los Angeles, with 625,000 students spread from some of the area’s wealthiest neighborhoods to some of its poorest.

The district has a broad policy that forbids elementary schools from using donated money to pay for “basics” the system should provide. At the secondary level, the rule is stricter--proceeds from student body or booster club fund-raisers cannot be used for academic enrichment. A school can buy band uniforms or a public address system, but not hire a drama teacher or supply science books.

However, the policy is rarely invoked to turn away donations and there is no formal agreement on what “basics” are and when they become “enrichment.”

“I have parents and teachers who say to me ‘music is a basic’ and ‘art is a basic’ and in my heart I agree, even though the district isn’t providing those kinds of services anymore,” said Deputy Supt. Sidney Thompson.

“On the one hand, if you can buy it for the children at your school, I want you to have it. But it bothers me if the school across town can’t also buy it.”

The policy was enacted more than 20 years ago, Thompson said, to rein in large secondary schools capable of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to enrich academic offerings far beyond what was available at other schools.

“I remember when I was a principal at Markham Junior High in Watts in 1969,” Thompson said. “We were in a constant struggle not to be in the red with our student body funds. Over at Paul Revere (Jr. High) on the Westside, they could raise $25,000 with a magazine sale.

“The potential was there for real disparities in education if you allowed those schools to use the money they raised to provide a basic instructional program.”

Fund raising has reached such a fever pitch that the school board plans to reconsider its policy this summer to try to strike a balance that encourages parents’ generosity, but protects schools in low-income areas from falling behind their counterparts in wealthier neighborhoods.

“We have to have some limits, otherwise you’ll see the services stay in those places where they have the money, and disappear in others,” Thompson said. “As the dollars we can provide shrink, we’re going to have to take a closer look to make sure that fund raising doesn’t create a disparity between schools.”

Parents and teachers at schools in middle-class neighborhoods argue that they need to generate funds because their campuses are hardest hit by district funding cuts.

Schools in low-income neighborhoods with large numbers of children who do not speak English or do poorly on standardized tests receive extra state and federal funding--up to $400 per pupil--to compensate for the students’ learning handicaps. The money can be used to hire teachers aides, nurses, librarians--the kinds of people the district is cutting.

Because government grants are based largely on neighborhood demographics, campuses in more affluent areas receive less money, even though many include large numbers of poor and minority children who are bused in from overcrowded schools.

“At our school, 67% of the population is bused in, and we don’t get any federal funds for them,” said Pacific Palisades’ Wolterstorff. “The programs we pay for benefit every one of those children. We’re not just doing this just for the children in the Palisades.”

Many parents and school officials fear that increased reliance on private fund raising lets the state off the hook, as parents take on more responsibility for providing for their schools.

“I know the schools need the money, and I applaud those parents who work so hard (to raise funds), but I wish they’d take all that energy and volunteer to lobby in Sacramento to get more money,” said Carolyn Hubbs, mother of a third-grader at Palisades Elementary.

“I think that in public schools now, the parents are being held accountable with this endless stream of fund-raisers,” she said. “It irritates me that our children have to be involved in constantly selling raffle tickets, magazines. . . . The pressure to pay for their education shouldn’t be on our children’s shoulders.”